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      Sam Butcher, Who Gave the World Precious Moments, Dies at 85

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      His childlike porcelain characters thrilled and inspired generations of collectors. They also made him a millionaire.Sam Butcher, the soft-spoken artist whose doe-eyed, pastel-hued porcelain Precious Moments figurines ignited a global collecting frenzy and made him a wealthy man, and whose Christian faith spurred him to build his own version of the Sistine Chapel in Carthage, Mo., died on May 20 at his home there. He was 85.His death was confirmed by his son Jon.Mr. Butcher was the Michelangelo of Missouri, and his adorable snub-nosed Precious Moments characters were “the Beanie Babies of porcelain,” as The Wall Street Journal once put it. Their zealous collectors, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, built rooms for their Precious Moments figurines, convened in regional clubs and made pilgrimages to Carthage, where they slept in the Precious Moments motel or the R.V. park, marveled at the Precious Moments Fountain of the Angels, dined in the Precious Moments food courts and wandered the 30-acre grounds. (Carthage also hosted Precious Moments weddings.)For a time, the Precious Moments Care-a-Van — an 18-wheeler kitted out like a museum, filled with figurines and dioramas that told Mr. Butcher’s life story — toured the country. There were hundreds and hundreds of Precious Moments licensees, which made hats, keychains, watches, greeting cards, books and a children’s Bible. At the company’s peak, in 1996 and 1997, Precious Moments’ global retail sales reached over $500 million each year, a stunning amount for a man who was once so poor that he struggled to buy groceries for his seven children.Mr. Butcher, whose fans sought him out at the Precious Moments compound to autograph their figurines and posters (he always carried two pens to do so), was an unlikely-looking millionaire: a rumpled figure typically clad in bluejeans and a T-shirt, with paint in his bushy hair and a shy smile.“Most people just think I’m the gardener,” he said.Mr. Butcher and a colleague began making greeting cards and posters featuring waifish children in the 1970s. A giftware company thought the characters had commercial potential as figurines. By 1995, Precious Moments were said to be the No. 1 collectible in the world.Lissa Forliti-Aska, via Associated PressMr. Butcher had been working with an international nondenominational ministry for children, teaching and illustrating Bible stories, when he and a colleague, Bill Biel, began making inspirational greeting cards and posters featuring his winsome characters in the early 1970s. “I came up with ‘Precious’ and he came up with ‘Moments,’” Mr. Butcher told The Kansas City Star in 1995.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sanford L. Smith, Creator of Prestigious Art Fairs, Dies at 84

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      Over four decades, he produced more than 150 events. Some dealers reported selling more in a weekend at a Smith fair than in a year in their galleries.Sanford L. Smith, an art lover and entrepreneur who created some of New York’s most prestigious art and design fairs, generating millions of dollars in sales and drawing attention to previously overlooked areas of art, died on Saturday at a senior living facility in Manhattan. He was 84.The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Jill Bokor, said.Mr. Smith didn’t invent the art fair, but he made his events essential stops for both buyers and sellers. Owners of some Lower Manhattan galleries would spend tens of thousands of dollars to move their wares a few miles north to the Park Avenue Armory, where many of Mr. Smith’s shows were held.Evan Snyderman, an owner of R & Company, a TriBeCa design gallery, said that at Salon Art + Design, one of Mr. Smith’s fairs, “we always reconnect with clients that we don’t see in other places — including New Yorkers who never come downtown.”Some dealers reported selling more art in a long weekend at a Sanford Smith fair than in a whole year at their own galleries.During his years in what he called “show business,” Mr. Smith ran more than 150 fairs, including the Fall Antiques Show, Modernism and the Outsider Art Fair. They were popular (in several cases attracting some 10,000 visitors over a three- or four-day weekend) as well as critical successes. The Times called his 2012 Salon “a museum in the making.” Asked to describe his career in a 2022 interview for this obituary, Mr. Smith said, “I filled holes.” What he meant was that he found gaps in between what other art fairs offered, and created new events to meet those needs. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lifelong ‘Star Trek’ Fan Leaves Behind a Massive Trove of Memorabilia

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      Troy Nelson and his younger brother Andrew were almost inseparable.The two youngest of six, they were born two years apart. They lived together in their childhood home in Bremerton, Wash., for more than half a century. Near their home, there is a park bench on which they carved their initials as young boys.The Nelson brothers never married or had children. They worked together at the same senior home. They even once, as teenagers, dated the same girl at the same time while working different shifts at the same pizza shop. This lasted a week until they realized it.“Two parts of one body,” Evan Browne, their older sister, said of their relationship in an interview.On Feb. 28, Andrew Nelson, who had been treated for cancer for years, went to feed the chickens and ducks that were gifts from Ms. Browne to her brothers. He had a heart attack and died. He was 55. Just hours later, Troy Nelson, who was stricken with grief, took his own life. He was 57.“He had talked about it before,” Browne, 66, said, tearfully. “He said, ‘Hey, if Andrew goes, I’m out of here. I’m checking out.’ Andrew would say the same thing, and then it really happened.”The collection of “Star Trek” memorabilia left by Mr. Nelson is among the largest known, according to the president of a nonprofit that focuses on the franchise.Connie Aramaki for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Woman Who Tried to Make Porn Safe for Feminism

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      How the archive of Candida Royalle, a porn star turned pioneering director, landed at Harvard — and inspired a new book challenging the conventional history of the sexual revolution.Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is the nation’s leading repository for women’s history, home to the papers of suffragists and social reformers, poets and politicians, the collective behind “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and iconic figures like Amelia Earhart, Angela Davis and Julia Child.But in its basement vaults, carefully preserved in a box, you can also find a rather different artifact: a costume from the 1978 pornographic comedy “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.”The movie, starring John C. Holmes as a pimp who oversees a prostitution ring masquerading as a pizza delivery service, was history-making in its own way, as one of the earliest examples of what became a classic trope — porn with pepperoni. But the costume is at the Schlesinger because of another name on the bill: Candida Royalle.Royalle, who died in 2015, was a minor celebrity in her day. She was a porn star from the 1970s golden age who moved to the other side of the camera, producing feminist erotica that focused on female fantasies, and female audiences.During the so-called sex wars of the 1980s, Royalle faced off against anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who dismissed women in the profession as stooges of the patriarchy. And in the 1990s, she became a godmother to the mediagenic sex-positive feminists riding feminism’s third wave.Today, Royalle’s name may ring few bells. But her voluminous archive is now housed at Harvard, where the trove of diaries, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, videos and memorabilia is opening up a new window onto the sexual revolution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Guy Wildenstein, Art Family Patriarch, Found Guilty in Tax Trial

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      Mr. Wildenstein hid a prized art collection and other assets from French authorities to avoid paying millions in inheritance taxes, a Paris court ruled.Guy Wildenstein, the international art dealer, was found guilty in France on Tuesday of massive tax fraud, the latest twist after years of legal entanglements that have unraveled the secrecy that once surrounded his powerful family dynasty.Mr. Wildenstein, 78, the Franco-American patriarch of the family and president of Wildenstein & Co. in New York, was sentenced by the Paris Appeals Court to a four-year prison sentence, with half of it suspended, and the other half to be served under house arrest with an electronic bracelet. The court also sentenced him to pay a one million euro fine, or about $1.08 million.He stood accused of hiding significant chunks of his family’s art collection and other assets in a maze of trusts and shell companies when his father, Daniel, died in 2001, and after his brother, Alec, died in 2008.Prosecutors had said that he was trying to dodge hundreds of millions of euros in inheritance taxes. At the trial, which was held in the fall, they had requested a slightly more lenient prison sentence for Mr. Wildenstein, but they had also requested a much larger €250 million fine, or about $270 million.The Wildensteins, a family of French art dealers spanning five generations, were historically secretive about the exact details of their collection, which has included works by Caravaggio, Fragonard and many other blue-chip artists.Prosecutors said that the family was responsible for “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history, by concealing art and other assets under complex foreign trusts and by shielding artworks worth millions of dollars in tax havens. By doing this, prosecutors said, the family grossly underestimated its enormous wealth when the time came to pay inheritance taxes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Neil Gaiman on the Collectibles He’s Auctioning

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      Art by Moebius, a Christmas card by Gaiman and a Swamp Thing cover are among the items.“I like the idea of spreading joy,” Neil Gaiman, the author of the Sandman series, said in an interview about why he is selling some of the original comic book art, toys and other collectibles he has amassed.During the dark days of pandemic lockdowns, buying art provided a particular comfort, he recalled. Works would arrive and he would “just kvell,” he said. He remembered buying a drawing of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet in the snow, by the British artist E.H. Shepard. “If someone comes to the house, I say, ‘Come and look at this,’ if they are the right sort of person,” he said.He views art ownership as custodial. “It’s your job to keep it safe and hope the house doesn’t burn down while it is in your care,” he said. Then someone else can do the same, he said, and “hope their house doesn’t burn down.”Gaiman said he was inspired by his friend Geoffrey Notkin, of “Meteorite Men” on the Science Channel, who auctioned part of his collection of meteorites and donated some proceeds to charity.Gaiman will donate part of the auction proceeds to the Hero Initiative, which is an emergency fund for comics creators, and the Authors League Fund, which benefits writers in financial hardship; he will also give living artists whose work sells part of the proceeds. The items are on display at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, and bidding starts on Friday.More than 100 pieces are up for sale, and Gaiman pointed to some highlights. The author Neil Gaiman said he hopes others find joy in the memorabilia he is shedding.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mighty Shiva Was Never Meant to Live in Manhattan

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      “What if museums give back so much art that they have nothing left to display?” As a scholar of the debates about returning cultural objects to the countries from which they were stolen, I have, over the years, heard many variations of that question. “Museums have lots and lots of stuff,” I usually answer, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like they’re just going to shut down.”But in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a substantial proportion of its Khmer-era works to Cambodia, which is claiming still more, including nearly all the museum’s major Cambodian pieces. Last month, the American Museum of Natural History indefinitely closed two of its halls in response to new federal regulations about the display of Native American sacred and burial artifacts. Now Manhattan’s Rubin Museum of Art, which features art from the Himalayas, has announced that it will close later this year. The museum says the decision is unrelated to issues of cultural repatriation, but it comes after the museum faced many accusations of cultural theft and returned some prized pieces.Clearly, I need to change my answer.When stolen artifacts go back to their rightful owners, it is now clear, some display cases will indeed empty out, some galleries will shut their doors, and entire museums may even close. But it’s worth it. Repatriating these precious items is still the right thing to do, no matter the cost.Why? Museums are supposed to educate us about other ways of being in the world. But looted artifacts alone — removed from their original context, quarantined in an antiseptic display case — cannot do this. Unlike, say, Impressionist paintings or Pop Art sculptures, ritual objects were not meant to be seen in a gallery at a time of the viewer’s choosing. Used alongside music, scents and tastes, these holy relics are tools to help participants in rituals achieve a transcendent experience. Imagine looking at a glow stick necklace and thinking it could teach you what it’s like to greet the sunrise dancing ecstatically with hundreds of strangers.The Rubin Museum, which displays art from Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, returned two stolen objects to Nepal in 2022 and last year surrendered another, a spectacular 16th-century mask depicting one of Shiva’s manifestations. By chance, I heard the news about the Rubin’s closing while I was looking at photographs from the mask’s homecoming ceremony.The mask was one of a nearly identical pair depicting the snarling deity with golden skulls and snakes twining through blood-red hair. For centuries, they had been featured in an annual ceremony, in which worshipers sought blessings by drinking rice beer from the masks’ lips. In the mid 1990s they were both stolen from the home of the family that was entrusted to care for them when the ceremony was not underway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

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      Skulls from a collection used to further racist science have been laid to rest. Questions surrounding the interment have not.There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”On this everyone could agree.The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.Human remains, which are in the repositories of institutions all across the country, present a particularly delicate challenge. The Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, which has been at the Penn Museum since 1966, is an especially notorious example, with more than a thousand skulls gathered in furtherance of vile ideas about race.Drummers at the start of the commemoration service at the Penn Museum on Saturday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThe museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More